The Gods of the Copybook Headings

A page from a 19th-century copybook, in which the printed headings have been copied. The homily is paraphrased from a 17th-century sermon of Isaac Barrow, Against Detraction — "Good nature like a bee, collects honey from every herb. Ill nature, like a spider, sucks poison from the flowers."

"The Gods of the Copybook Headings" is a poem published by Rudyard Kipling in 1919, which, editor Andrew Rutherford said, contained "age-old, unfashionable wisdom" that Kipling saw as having been forgotten by society and replaced by "habits of wishful thinking."[1]

The "copybook headings" to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims, extolling age old wisdom - virtues such as honesty or fair dealing that were printed at the top of the pages of 19th-century British students' special notebooks, called copybooks. The school-children had to write them by hand repeatedly down the page. However, the marketplaces were areas that dishonesty and immorality ruled. The Gods (or principles) of the marketplace represent selfishness, reckless progress, over-indulgence and a failure to learn from the past.

The work has been described as "beautifully captur[ing] the thinking of Schumpeter and Keynes."[2]David Gilmour says that while topics of the work are the "usual subjects", the commentary "sound better in verse"[3] while Alice Ramos says that they are "far removed from Horace's elegant succinctness" but do "make the same point with some force."[4]